Journal of Research in Music Education

The purpose of this ethnographic study was to examine student outcomes of a curriculum designed to address the overlapping aims and practices of music education and multicultural education ideals in a fifth-grade music class. The following questions guided the research: What are the student outcomes as a result of a traditional music curriculum when it is designed to focus on selected musical cultures of Africa and the African diaspora? Are children capable of developing cultural understanding through a process of learning experiences that include emphasis on the sociocultural features of the musical cultures? What are the culturally specific musical skills that children develop in classes based on the goals of multicultural and music education? A curriculum was created to explore five selected musical cultures. This was followed by an examination of children’s responses and perspectives and the impact of the learning experiences. The most pertinent themes were: cultural authenticity in performance, social bias, and multicultural sensitivity. This study benefits music educators by offering evidence that children can develop musical and social understandings as a result of curricular design and consequently, how that learning shapes children’s understanding of processes that are historical, cultural, and even democratic.

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of motivation on upper-grade elementary students’ preferences for acoustic or tablet-based instruments. The effect of cultural familiarity on musical instrument preference was also investigated. Participants (N = 138) were classified by motivation levels (low, medium-low, medium-high, and high) and played the guitar, tablet-based guitar, gayageum (Korean string instrument), and tablet-based gayageum. After playing each instrument, participants rated preferences and provided their reasons. Results of the mixed-model ANOVA revealed two significant main effects for instrumental mode (acoustic vs. tablet-based) and motivation on instrument preference. A significant three-way interaction was also found: Cultural Familiarity × Mode × Motivation. The two main effects of mode and motivation produced a general pattern in instrument preference: (a) Students generally preferred acoustic instruments to tablet-based instruments, and (b) the level of motivation was associated with the degree of preference ratings. However, the interaction effect deviated from the general pattern; the low motivation group participants’ preference ratings between acoustic and tablet-based guitars were not significantly different. This deviation from the general pattern appeared only for the culturally familiar instrument (guitar) but not the culturally unfamiliar instrument (gayageum) among the low motivation group.

The purpose of this study was to explore a microanalysis technique for measuring instrumentalists’ self-regulation tendencies during music practice. A secondary purpose was to investigate whether an intervention informed by the features of the microanalysis technique would increase the students’ self-regulated learning tendencies. Three undergraduate instrumental music education majors volunteered to participate in this study. This study was designed as a multiple-baselines experiment spanning 15 consecutive days. Data sources included (a) entrance interviews; (b) daily practice efficacy ratings; (c) data gathered from pre- and posttest microanalysis sessions; (d) detailed behavioral analyses of video-recorded, pre- and posttest practice sessions; and (e) a focus group exit interview. The microanalytic intervention designed for this study involved a coaching session in which a member of the research team explicitly drew attention to the affective, behavioral, and metacognitive qualities related to effective practicing during a student’s practice session. The pretest microanalysis data revealed distinct learning profiles for each student that were corroborated with information from the other data sources. The intervention had modest effects that varied across participants, suggesting that it was useful for bringing to light and addressing individuals’ specific self-regulatory deficiencies in a manner respective to their needs.

The purpose of this study was to test the domain specificity of achievement goals across music, visual art, and sports specializations, as measured by Elliot’s 2 × 2 achievement goal framework. Participants in the study were 103 volunteer student teachers from a teacher training institute in Singapore specializing in music, visual art, and physical education. Data were collected via self-report questionnaires that included measures of (a) the 2 × 2 achievement goal orientation constructs; (b) incremental and entity beliefs among the participants in music, visual art, and sports; and (c) participants’ enjoyment, perceived competence, effort, and tension while being engaged in music, visual art, and sports. MANOVA analyses indicated that (a) achievement goals are domain-specific and are highest in participants’ area of specialization; (b) implicit theories can be generalized across the three specializations, with higher incremental beliefs than entity beliefs reported across all specializations; and (c) enjoyment was highest for those who specialized in that particular area. Finally, mastery-approach goals positively predicted enjoyment in each specialization.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the psychometric quality (i.e., validity and reliability) of a rating scale to assess pre-service teachers’ lesson plan development in the context of secondary-level music performance classrooms. The research questions that guided this study include: (1) What items demonstrate acceptable model fit for the construct of lesson plan development in the context of a secondary-level music performance classroom? (2) How does the structure of the rating scale vary across items? and (3) Does differential severity emerge for academic administrators or music education content specialists across items? Using multiple teacher effectiveness frameworks, the lesson plans in this study were evaluated using a 4-point Likert-type rating scale (e.g., strongly agree, agree, disagree, strongly disagree) consisting of five domains: (a) instructional planning, (b) instructional delivery, (c) differentiated instruction, (d) assessment uses, and (e) assessment strategies. Secondary-level school administrators (n = 8) and music education content specialists (n = 8) rated 32 lesson plans using a balanced incomplete assessment network. The multifaceted Rasch measurement partial credit model was used in this study. Results suggest higher rater severity among administrators than music specialists. Of the 68 potential pairwise interactions examined in the study, 5 (7.4 %) of those were found to be statistically significant, which indicates that 5 raters demonstrated differential severity across at least one lesson plan. Implications for student teacher preparation, teacher effectiveness, and the validity of measures are discussed.